growth hacking

Imagine you’re a 17-year-old girl at a well-to-do high school in Los Angeles, and you just discovered Snapchat.
Until that moment, every time you thought about sending risqué photos to your romantic interest, you had to worry about images of your naked self ending up on the internet. When you wanted to gossip with your peers about a crush or a friend or an enemy, you had to worry about… Read More

Funk band Vulfpeck is showing everyone what growth hacking is all about — exploiting weaknesses to promote your work. The band recently released a new album on Spotify called Sleepify. It consists of 10 songs comprised entirely of silence. Each song is 31 or 32 seconds long. Not coincidentally, Spotify pays royalties when someone listens to a song for more than 30 seconds.
In a video… Read More

Andreessen Horowitz-backed music lyrics and annotations Rap Genius was the latest to stray over to the darker side of so-called “growth hacking,” with its spammy SEO tactics disguised as an affiliate program. Called out, exposed and now punished by Google, the site’s traffic has tanked. But Rap Genius, thanks in part to that $15 million investment, will probably recover. Read More

About a month ago, I wrote about a stealthy company called IronPearl, led by Stan Chudnovsky and James Currier. They were growth hackers before the word “growth hacker” even existed. In fact, they don’t even really like the word “growth hacker.”
For years, Chudnovsky had been advising companies like Goodreads, Path, Wanelo, Poshmark, Lyft and Highlight on how… Read More

Fandrop, a new content sharing site started by a group of growth hackers, is debuting today to help you find out what’s trending across the web. The site surfaces things like tweets and Facebook posts, YouTube videos, images from sites like imgur, articles, web pages, and more. In some ways, it’s similar to other social networks and social sharing sites, in that you can friend… Read More

Last fall, Udemy co-founder Gagan Biyani and Wildfire’s Erin Turner held the first Growth Hackers Conference, in which executives, entrepreneurs and investors from LinkedIn, Spark Capital, Bump, Airbnb and Dropbox gathered to growth hacking and what it means for early-stage startups. One of the keynote speakers was well known investor and entrepreneur, Chamath Palihapitiya, who, for… Read More

Editor’s note: Aaron Ginn is currently Head of Growth at StumbleUpon.
More and more startups are looking to hire growth hackers or to develop their own growth strategies. However, there are a handful of myths about the purpose and function of growth hacking itself that have gained traction. In this article, I will explore six of the more common myths ones that serve to misconstrue… Read More